Don't worry about full grain brewing initially. Extract brews can be damn good. The keys to good beer are 1) use liquid yeast, in date, treated well, 2) use whole flower hops, frozen is fine, rather than pellets, 3) clean everything well.
Find someone to brew with the first time. It's a lot easier than the books make it seem like it is.
A good first beer:
7 lbs dark extract
2 oz fuggles hops
1 vial white or wyeast english ale yeast
4 hrs before you start brewing, put the vial of yeast on the counter
boil 3 gallons of water with the 7 lbs of extract for 60 minutes with 1.5 oz of the fuggles in a muslin bag. for the last 15 minutes, throw in the other .5 oz.
put 3 gallons of VERY cold water in your primary fermenter. add the liquid from the above boil to this. Put the airlock on, and wait for it to cool to about 75 degrees.
Once the wort (the liquid) is at 75 degrees in the primary fermenter, add the yeast. close it up, put on the air lock, and agitate 3x4 a day.
Use a 7ish gallon primary fermenter to make things easy, you have to have room for blowoff. I like using a 1" blowoff hose from the bung to a bucket of water as an airlock for primary fermentation. By the end of the first 24 hrs, you should have significant bubbles.
Once primary fermentation has stopped, transfer the liquid to secondary fermentation. Leave any solids behind if you can, they'll introduce off flavors potentially to your beer.
Leave the beer in secondary fermentation for at least 48 hrs, but up to 2 weeks.
At this point, you're ready to bottle or keg. If you're kegging, and planning to artificially carbonate, just transfer the liquid to the keg, aerating as little as possible, then charge with co2.
If you're gonna naturally carbonate in the keg, use 1/3 cup of corn sugar to prime the keg. Seal with CO2 and set aside for 2 weeks to carbonate.
If you're bottling, use 7/8 cup of corn sugar in your bottling bucket. Use a bottling cane, so you displace enough liquid so as to not overfill. Overfilled bottles explode when they carbonate.
in 2 weeks time, you'll have a nice english brown ale. This can age for up to 6 months.
In all of this, keep temperature between 55 and 70 degrees. Don't let your wort get too warm, or it will kill your yeast. Colder will slow or stop fermentation